Conventional spectacle eyewear has been produced by the process of first manufacturing frames or frame components followed by cutting and edging lenses to fit the frame, or to be mounted together by a bridge and including end-pieces to which temples or earpieces are attached. The spectacle lenses are produced in an uncut form by way of casting or molding a semi-finished blank with one surface complete and surfacing the opposing surface to create a finished prescription or by casting or molding a lens wherein both surfaces are finished.
The finished uncut blank is then oriented and displaced to produce a final astigmatism axis and centering of the lens to correspond with the intended vertical and horizontal size of the frame and the pupillary distance of the intended wearer. The conventional methods of fabricating eyewear require machinery for cutting and edging finished blanks to a proper size and shape of eyewear.
It is estimated that more than 300 million people in the world are functionally blind due to uncorrected refractive errors. The majority of these people lack the geographic or economic access to eye examinations and acquisition of prescription eyewear. The required inventory of uncut semi-finished blanks, finished blanks, surfacing equipment and cutting and edging equipment is far too costly and skilled-labor intensive to be available to this population in need of prescription eyewear. Even if the equipment and labor were available, the power and service requirements for the machinery remain high and the need for inventory of semi-finished or finished blanks persists.
Charitable organizations are known to conduct missions to provide eye examination services and eyewear to this population. The most common practice is to collect used eye glasses, catalog the prescriptions and attempt to match a required prescription with one found in the collected used eye glasses. The practice of collection, cataloging, transporting and delivering the used eyewear is inherently inefficient and the result is most often a poorly matched prescription in a used and questionably serviceable frame.